I’ve been reading about filesystems and partitioning a lot lately, since I’m going to do a fresh install of Leap.
Some comp specs: AMD FX-4100; 8GiB RAM; 1 500GiB SSD (root) + a 1TiB HDD (home) - going to be used for development, games (non high-end) and basic audio editing / recording.
So this is what I had in mind:
sda : 500GB SSD (waaaay too large, I know… sue me )
/boot : ext2 150MB
/swap : swap 2GB
/ : Btrfs 400GB
remainder : unallocated
sdb : 1TB HDD (also waaaay too large…)
/tmp : tmpfs 1GB
/var : XFS 1GB
remainder : /home XFS
Any insights if this is a ‘good’ way to go and how to achieve it; 'cause I can’t find a way to select tmpfs filesystem through the GUI (under expert partitioning). Or should I just leave /tmp and /var as subvolume on the SSD and not worry too much ?
400G seems way too much for “/”, unless you are planning on installing a lot of other software.
Note that “tmpfs” doesn’t use disk space. It is allocated from memory (or swap). You might want to increase the swap size if you plan on using tmpfs. And I advise against “/var” on “tmpfs”. There is stuff there that needs to persist between boots.
With the disk sizes you mention, and with the way I use a computer, I would suggest:
100G for “/” on the SSD. Maybe increase swap to 10G. Keep “/var” as part of the root partition. If you want swap to be “tmpfs”, you can make that change after install.
I would use the remainder of the SSD for “/home”.
I would then mount the HD elsewhere, perhaps as “/data”. I would plan to put multimedia data there, since that is what is usually large. And I would put symlinks in my home directory so that the multimedia on “/data” is accessible as if it were part of “/home”.
You obviously don’t have to follow how I would do it. But I hope I am giving you some food for thought as you make your plans.
100 gig root seems over large to me unless you plan on large databases that may live there. But it would be better to give such their own partition. Unless you have really special needs 40-50 gig is more the enough. Better to maintain 2 partitions for root one for current OS the other reserved for next. Then just rotate partitions with OS versions. Reduces new version shock greatly
The idea of using tmpfs for /tmp and placing /var (with XFS, not tmpfs) on the HDD was just to keep them off of the SSD - as I read on one of the many SSD performance guides…
But I guess it won’t matter that much anymore with the newer SSD’s ?
I like the idea of symlinking the HDD partition under /home. Never done that before so gonna need a little bit of reading but will try it out.
This is my new setup - based on my current used diskspace:
sda: 500GB SSD
/boot : ext2 150MB
/swap : swap 10GB
/ : Btrfs 50GB
/home : XFS (remaining space)
sdb : 1TB HDD
/data : XFS 500GB (symlinked to /home…)
/backup : XFS 500GB
2 root partitions sounds intruiging but all the above will be more than enough trouble for me
In reply of my own post above; I just read that Btrfs cannot use different file systems for different mount points. So /home should be Btrfs instead of XFS I guess :
So much to learn…
Thanks. I’m using XFS as proposed by the partitioner during install. Just had to remove /home subvolume from the list since I already had a separate /home - otherwise I got a “shadowing” warning (can’t remember the exact wording though).
It says if you use btrfs on the whole disk. It is not how openSUSE partitions disks by default - it has multiple partitions and btrfs occupies one partition, not the whole disk.
I’d recommend mounting /tmp to your SSD. Although it would be a bit faster mounted as tmpfs, apps like web browsers will write to tmpfs as a file is being downloaded before copying to their final destination (after completed download). If you mount as tmpfs, it will take a big hit on your overall memory resources and likely limit the size of any web browser downloads. If you do mount as tmpfs, when you encounter the limitation I describe, you’d have to create a special configuration to alter the application’s behavior (Can do so in Firefox, for example). Since you have plenty of room on your SSD which is plenty fast (compared to an HDD), it’s just simpler to mount on your SSD.
Recommend you first install using a default layout and inspect what you’re given, IMO a default layout currently is very usable.
Then, if you wish blow it away and re-install defining your own custom layout.
I do agree that you should deploy your root partition on your SSD for fast performance and your /home directory on your HDD for cheaper storage of your many User files. As noted, if you intend to install many or very big apps, then you can benefit from a larger root partition.
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